Chapter 1569: Chapter 263: The Warrior’s Curse
At this moment, the sun had just risen not long ago, and it was the most vibrant time of the day.
People were dressed and either on their way to work, already working, or leisurely strolling outside, chatting with others.
From the first ring to the second ring, vendors were energetically shouting, preparing their goods—many of them were mobile vendors, with their “shops” actually being a cart, and some even had a makeshift bed on their carts.
Men and women, young and old, gathered around their carts, waiting for food or drinks to be produced. Farther away, groups of simply dressed slaves sat or stood, eagerly waiting for something.
But upon reaching the third ring, the streets suddenly became much cleaner.
There were no vendors pushing carts, nor slaves sitting on the ground. The streets were less crowded, and the shops on both sides were more advanced and luxurious.
Yet the next moment, a ripple almost visible to the naked eye swept beneath their feet—
Many fragile pottery items in the second ring shattered almost simultaneously. People felt a sudden unsteadiness underfoot; some fell to the ground, cars and signboards collapsed; while in the first ring, there was just an intense shaking, with water surface violently shaking and baskets holding food and ingredients toppling over.
In the more noble third ring, however, the disaster increased several times over.
The ground rolled like milk covered with a thick layer of chocolate powder, the surface rolling to reveal deeper sand and stones. Many shop barriers flickered uncertainly, people walking on the streets would suddenly fall, trees in the city swayed and collapsed, fragile buildings crumbled.
There was no confusion or screaming—those who could come here were strong individuals from the outside world, at least at the fourth energy level, with many at the fifth energy level.
For a moment, various Path glows radiated everywhere.
Solid and shattered barriers, ground turned solid and then broken, chanting spells, eerily lit rituals, and even the roar of a dragon.
With everyone’s combined efforts, the trembling earth soon returned to calm.
Only from directly above could one clearly see the aftermath of Hayna’s strike—in her attack range, there was a twisted and tattered, dog-bitten-like mess of ruins. It mostly covered the residence of the Right Ceremony Master but didn’t spread further.
“Already… so fast…?!”
It had only been over a minute since Hayna swung her attack.
She was astonished—in Hayna’s perception, even if the third ring wouldn’t collapse and fragment from her wrathful strike, it would at least fall into complete chaos. People would scream, fear, flee, die… She even felt guilty for it.
This was also the reason why Hayna rarely used her Path power.
She vaguely understood her own strength but dared not bear the consequences of using it. Although she was already at the top tier of combat power in the world, she refused to admit it all, still hoping to preserve her previous interpersonal relationships.
Like a chubby cat stubbornly trying to fit into a box it could squeeze into when it was younger.
As she felt apprehension and fear toward her strength, Hayna also had a strong sense of pride and a faint arrogance—
She actually knew the extent of the damage she could inflict and how many people she surpassed. Precisely because of this, hidden within her gentleness and humility was a subtle arrogance. It was the self-assured feeling of “though I am polite to you, I could destroy you at any moment.”
But now…
After truly using this power, she did not achieve the results she imagined.
This in some ways relieved her, made her feel safer… But from another perspective, Hayna also felt a vague void, a sense of loss, and even a hint of the cautiousness or cowardice unique to the Path of Adaptation: “Lily, let’s hurry up and leave. They will soon discover the problem here.”
“Leave? Yes, it’s time to leave, Master is waiting for you to return—you’ve been gone too long. Is there trouble?”
Lily said calmly: “But there’s no rush. We can also see their reaction first.”
“Because…”
Hayna shrunk her neck, feeling a bit guilty.
—Actually, she had already found the location of the Right Ceremony Master, but he was sleeping.
If she aimed directly to kill him, the process might not even take two hours. A fragile ritualist, unguarded, could be defeated in seconds by a fellow Path warrior—even one granted a Golden Path Trait by the Pillar God.
But this was Hayna’s first revenge… she wanted it to feel more ceremonial. Or perhaps due to the newfound confidence and arrogance from her acquisition of such power, she wanted to confront him face to face and then justly judge him, rather than resorting to ambush or assassination.
Thus, Hayna patiently waited until the other party woke up.
In her mind, she kept reenacting his every action during the ceremony—how he approached with a kind and reliable smile, deceived her, and how I, unknowingly brought him into my diligently established sanctuary as a teammate.
Hayna had forged trust and friendship over long years with the refugees she had painstakingly gathered.
But when she introduced this hard-won “teammate” to the refugees and children, she likely unconsciously considered those who came from the same world as her to be in a “more equal” relationship.
From that time onward, people started disappearing from the sanctuary. Not until the tenth person did Hayna finally realize.
The cake maker didn’t just kill them. He also patiently tortured them, causing significant emotional fluctuations, transforming these civilians into ritual materials in the most efficient way… Even in front of Hayna, he used a spell to skin a person alive; this person was the first one Hayna ever rescued.
It was that shock that made Hayna truly realize—she had stepped out of campus and into this harsh transcendent society.
In some way, the cake maker was indeed Hayna’s true mentor. At school, she was sheltered by her teachers for her excellent grades. During her internship, she met Aiwass and Sherlock and gained the friendship of these “future big figures,” which smoothed her life… In reality, she hadn’t truly entered the workplace, faced more powerful and cunning transcendent criminals, or even killed anyone.
It was from that incident on that Hayna began shedding her naivety.
—Maybe more than judging his crimes, what she wanted was to judge her own foolish and naive self. Sometimes, Hayna thought so.
Because indeed, she couldn’t argue against the cake maker’s words—she was foolish for trusting others during the ascension ceremony; it took her so long to realize something was wrong, if she were outside she would have been dead by now.
Because of this, Hayna repeatedly rehearsed her lines in her mind.
Just like the stirring lines in knight novels, she wished to righteously refute his hypocritical and deceitful words, leaving him speechless and bringing about a just judgment.
… But when Hayna killed his guards and truly started arguing, she realized one problem.
She couldn’t argue back.
She couldn’t even righteously refute each of the cake maker’s words—the ascension ceremony was indeed deceptive, and Transcenders indeed should seize every cost to grow stronger. Just like a viewer shouldn’t consider the villain in a stage play to be the real bad guy… Even though the cake maker was indeed a very bad person, somehow her motives for troubling him seemed flawed.
Finally, she smashed him into a pulp with a shield, effortlessly completing her revenge—even stepping into Holy Spring City for this, soon to face the Celestial Marshal.
This emptiness, this sense of void… made Hayna feel her “hatred” seemed quite laughable. It was as if she really acted out of pettiness, finding past grievances from a virtual game’s slaughter in reality.
Was she wrong?
But she felt something was off… She firmly believed he was in the wrong but just couldn’t refute his sophisms.
Hayna only felt her mind turning into a muddled mess.
—Not sure if it was a curse from Supreme Heaven, but she felt the more she advanced on the warrior’s career path, the dumber her previously smart mind became. The answers she could instantly come up with before now took longer, and she even struggled with some high school level questions.